Hacker News: vadelfe

New comment by vadelfe in "Show HN: I manually organized 1000 profiles (am I a dinosaur?)"

vadelfe — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:37:53 +0000

Happy to answer questions about the categorization system, tagging structure, or the process of curating the profiles.

Show HN: I manually organized 1000 profiles (am I a dinosaur?)

vadelfe — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:34:29 +0000

Over the last few months I've been doing something that feels completely irrational in 2026.

While everyone is building AI tools and automating everything, I started manually curating people from the internet who talk about topics that can help you improve different areas of life.

Not ranking them. Not claiming they are “the best”. Just organizing who talks about what.

The Process: 1,150+ sources (authors, founders, scientists, creators and regular people). 100% manual categorization. No AI scrapers. Organized by categories, subcategories and intent-based tags (all done by hand). Built entirely on spreadsheets before moving to this prototype. Right now it's about 1000+ sources organized around topics like health, skills, business, mindset, and others. I originally started doing this for myself because:

- I don't like that what I see online depends on an algorithm

- I know there's valuable content online, but finding it consistently is hard

- While organizing this, I kept discovering things I didn't know existed but were exactly what I needed

becometry.vercel.app

I'm genuinely curious: In an AI-saturated internet, does the idea of human-curated discovery still make sense to you? Does the 'Map' structure feel like a viable alternative to the way we consume information today? Happy to answer anything and open to brutally honest feedback.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47351118

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by vadelfe in "Sam Altman says OpenAI will tweak its Pentagon deal after surveillance backlash"

vadelfe — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:12:56 +0000

I think the real question is trust. Once a company starts working with the Pentagon, people will naturally assume the capabilities will expand over time. Even if today’s contract has limits, those limits can always change later.

New comment by vadelfe in "3D-printed TV from 'The Simpsons' plays actual episodes"

vadelfe — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:06:21 +0000

This is oddly satisfying. Not just the TV itself, but the idea of having random episodes playing like an old broadcast channel.

New comment by vadelfe in "The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)"

vadelfe — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:33:52 +0000

What makes the Gervais Principle interesting is that it frames organizations as systems that are supposed to become pathological over time. Instead of reforming them the economy just replaces them through mergers, layoffs, and new startups.

In that sense, the real “governance mechanism” isn’t internal management at all but the external Darwinian churn of the market.

New comment by vadelfe in "Why is email so resilient as a technology?"

vadelfe — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:14:54 +0000

It survives because it already solves the basic problem well enough. You can reach almost anyone and communicate without needing to join a platform or build a network first.

It’s simple, open, and relatively low-pressure compared to most modern communication tools. A lot of newer products try to improve it, but often they’re mostly adding layers rather than solving a fundamentally missing capability.

New comment by vadelfe in "Ask HN: Who Needs Help?"

vadelfe — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:10:32 +0000

What I probably need most right now is honest feedback. I’ve been building something and I’m trying to understand if the idea actually makes sense outside my own head.

New comment by vadelfe in "How many options fit into a boolean?"

vadelfe — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:56:50 +0000

The deeper you go into memory layout, the more you realize that even "simple" types aren't that simple.

New comment by vadelfe in "We are building data breach machines and nobody cares"

vadelfe — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:53:46 +0000

The Belmont analogy is great, but the deeper point is even scarier: most of the industry is giving non-deterministic systems direct access to deterministic infrastructure (databases, shells, email, etc).

Historically we spent decades reducing automation privileges and adding layers of verification. Agents seem to be reversing that trend almost overnight.

New comment by vadelfe in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

vadelfe — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:42:10 +0000

I'm building a human-curated map that organizes people and sources by topics (health, skills, business, mindset, etc.). Everything is categorized manually, no AI classification. Started as spreadsheets and now turning it into a prototype.

New comment by vadelfe in "Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults"

vadelfe — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:20:58 +0000

The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.

New comment by vadelfe in "I put my whole life into a single database"

vadelfe — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:18:03 +0000

This is fascinating. One question I always have with large personal datasets like this: at what point did you start getting genuinely surprising insights versus confirming things you already suspected?

380k datapoints sounds incredible but I imagine the real challenge is turning that into decisions that actually change behavior